Topic: The pirate ponzi fiasco - page 5. (Read 10215 times)

So who's going to start off all these racketeering and IRS investigations by reporting pirate's scheme (and possibly GPUMax) to the relevant authorities?  There might be a lot of people who want pirate's dealings put under a microscope, but not at the risk of their own financial affairs being subjected to scrutiny.

Did you claim your steak dinner under 'capitol gains' on your income tax ?

If so, please forward me the amount, as I need to claim that same amount as a LOSS.

thanks,
bitlane

I for one, have previously BEGGED to have my PMs read by theymos or any other MOD capable.....lol

Remember what gigavps said "honest people leave tracks in the sand" ......and I have never tried to hide.

The forum isn't based in the US.

I'll just leave these here...
Linux: http://www.gnupg.org/
Windows: http://gpg4win.org/
Mac: http://gpgtools.org/

I find that in these instances, it's helpful to compare the situation to one that may happen in real life.

In that instance, this makes bitcointalk.org rather like a hotel lobby. Along one wall is a row of mailboxes. each of us has a key to one of them. Here's the thing: The backs are open. It's well known that the proprietor has access to the contents of them. How else does he periodically save copies in the safe? And you guys are writing to each other using post cards. You want your mail to be private, use an envelope.

Theymos, I recommend the thread where release of those messages is discussed and (potentially) occurs be entitled "Postcards from Pirate".

That's an ironic comment in a thread where people are suggesting that the pass-through operators themselves may have been acting illegally.

Even where privacy laws do apply, the information they protect is not unlimited and nor is the obligation to protect it.  Maybe you could argue copyright in the PMs you authored, but how would you establish damages otherwise?

People are really selective about the extent to which they care about legalities around here.  Pretty much the only people well-positioned to take legal action over anything remotely connected with Bitcoin are those who've done absolutely everything by the book and reported every cent of income they've made from Bitcoin and not been involved in any Bitcoin enterprises which make their money from illegal activity.  I suspect such people are in the absolute minority.  Whether the PPT operators were complicit in the operation of a ponzi scheme or not, they've almost certainly committed other significant financial offences which would be revealed by any attempt they made to sue anyone.

I learned this years ago... If I want to send something that is private and I don't want the whole world to know what I wrote, I always use PGP.. The only way another party can read it is if the intended recipient unencrypted the messages and sent it to another individual..

I'ts very very easy to use pgp. We should never rely on the board or email operators that they will keep everything private.

After thinking about it, Im not so sure that most of the pass throughs deserve a scammer tag. Now, if they had knowledge of the workings and new it to be illegal, then yes, but the investor should do his/her diligence in learning what they are investing in.

Im sure some will probably deserve it while others no. It all comes down to what they were privy to and how they advertised the pass through..

If Pirate offered 2 percent instead of 7, I think that he would have got a lot more "investors".. Just because 2 percent is a lot more believable than 7.. But then again, when you say 7 percent, all you need is to survive the scam for about 10 weeks and you are paid back..

I believe that when a ponzi is detected, they will actually try to collect money from those that made more than their initial investment.. This will be very very difficult to prove, especially with bitcoin.. I would think that a lot of pass through operators are going to get sued. (Granted, I don't know how many of them let their true identity be known.)

Since so much money was lost, I just don't see those that lost a lot to sit on the sidelines and just let it go.. if I lost over a few thousand dollars, I know that i would be hiring an attorney and doing what I can to recover whatever..

I guess we will have to wait and see how many victims will team up and start suing Pirate and his pass throughs..

i do believe that Pirate will try to pass the blame on to his pass throughs to lighten his load..

I guess phase 2 is about begin in the ongoing Pirate drama... My wife calls it "As the Bitcoin turns"...

Maybe that should be a whole new section. that way all of Pirates threads can be found in one place.. lol..

There are millions of laws. I'm probably breaking dozens right now somehow. I'm not going to let these laws stop me from doing what's best. As I mentioned previously, I'm not sure what the best course of action is with the Pirate case -- I'll decide this later after some public discussion.

You stated it much better than I....

FAIL.

No. The possibility of privacy concerns in these cases never occurred to me, since the stuff I've read has always been boring trade stuff.

That's somewhat disheartening.

That's never happened.

And if a user is adjudged innocent, are they still notified that you browsed through them?

I only scanned through them to make sure that the SQL query (to archive them) worked as I intended. The PGP message blocks stood out.

I only read others' PMs without their permission during scam investigations, and I've only read a user's entire inbox a few times.

Ah, so you're already reading the pms.  Good to know.

We all know it's a Ponzi. Some of us are honest about it and some are not. I understand that it's impossible to get a person to see something when his livelihood and reputation depends on him not seeing it. Perfect certainty is not required for knowledge.

I noticed that some people communicated with Pirate using PGP-encrypted messages, which is smart.

I haven't decided yet what I will do. I want to see public discussion about it. It might not be necessary to release his PMs, so there's no point in arguing about it now, though.